A billboard displaying a campaign poster for Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega and his running mate and wife, Rosario Murillo.
Photograph: Jorge Torres/EPA

From my house overlooking Managua, the city at night looks like an amusement park – more Walt Disney fantasy than the capital of the poorest country in the American continent.

Gigantic metal trees, each studded with hundreds of colored lights have been installed all over town. A few might have been fine, but 130 of them in our small city are overwhelming and kitsch.

This makeover is the work of our eccentric first lady and future vice-president, Rosario Murillo: her way of imprinting herself in our lives.

Considering what is going on in Nicaragua, I often feel I am immersed in a twisted, magical-realist novel. Everything that was not supposed to happen again in my country is coming back.

We are reliving all that I thought had been eradicated when we, the Sandinista rebels, entered Managua on 19 July 1979 and ended 45 years of Somoza dynasty.

What hurts the most, is to see the past return in the figure of our old comrade-in-arms, Daniel Ortega. He and his wife have carefully woven a sticky web to trap Nicaraguans in a net of illusory progress.

Ortega ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990and in 2007, he ran for re-election.

I campaigned against him, certain that if he was re-elected, he would stay in power at all costs.

Friends tried to convince me Nicaragua was no longer the same. After experiencing 16 years of budding democracy, people would reject his authoritarian tendencies, they said.

But Ortega – aided by his wife – managed to sell himself to the Nicaraguan people as a democratic revolutionary.

Murillo designed a campaign that promised peace and love. She covered the John Lennon song Give Peace a Chance and used it with her own lyrics as a campaign theme.

Ortega and Murillo made amends with the Catholic church, and – after 25 years of living together – they were married by Managua’s cardinal and former nemesis, Miguel Obando y Bravo.

Miraculously, the couple went from dangerous atheists to fervent Christians from one day to the next. The illusion worked. He got elected.

A hard-working, determined woman, with a quasi-superstitious belief in her mission as savior of the people, Murillo has been key in strengthening Ortega’s hold on power.

She defended her husband even when her daughter from her first marriage accused Ortega of sexually abusing her. Her loyalty paid off, and she obtained a great deal of power.

Meanwhile, Ortega set about exerting absolute control over state institutions such as the electoral council, the supreme court, the national assembly, the army and the police.

Then he reformed the constitution to allow for indefinite re-elections. Most recently, in a coup de grace to any semblance of democracy, he took away the legal representation of the only opposition force capable of challenging him in the 2016 elections, which he then assigned to sycophants guaranteed to do his bidding.

Ortega had already announced in a speech that he would not accept international observers for the 6 November elections. “Shameless,” he called them, “they should observe their governments, not us.”

Meanwhile, Murillo began to appear more visibly in their political propaganda. While Ortega has not given one single press conference to the national media since 2007, every day at midday Murillo addresses the people on radio and TV, exalting the Christian, socialist and solidaristic nature of their political model.

The US and the European Union have expressed their concern, but Ortega has his anti-imperialist rhetoric at the ready and seems to relish the prospect of another round of defiance. For him, this is the second coming of the Sandinista revolution.

So far, the Nicaraguan people have mostly been passive. Ortega and Murillo have used billions from Venezuela to give bonuses to state employees and farmers, to distribute roofing materials in poor neighborhoods and to finance a variety of social programs.

Scared by the possibility of another bloody struggle, Nicaraguans have opted to take what they can and keep their opinions to themselves.

Somoza had two sons to continue his dynasty, Ortega and Murillo have five sons and two daughters.

Though they might feel very strong, we have seen this before. Nothing is for ever.